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Friday, August 3, 2012

In my hospital venue, I am an expert. If your labwork looks funky or you look like
your adrenals are making you fat and hairy, the request for assistance finds
its way to my pager or an appointment is set up for a session in the exam room. Data gets analyzed, key historical and
objective information solicited and a plan devised to make things better. Most of my consults come from capable
physicians who have done their best to manage what is before them but sometimes
the cavalry needs to be called in.

In a parallel fashion, the synagogue has not done well so
the president decided an expert opinion might be in order. We can argue whether or not the primary care
givers of the synagogue, its officers and Rabbi, have performed due diligence or
even tapped the resources or made the assessments that they should, but the
outcome has definitely lagged. There is
a certain amount of delusion that the officers routinely buy into, much like
doctors think that if their diabetics stop eating doughnuts their sugars will
become normal. They will become normal
if not all that deranged at the start, otherwise more significant intervention
is needed, and often something that the referring physician knows must be done
but is too timid to proceed. The young
personable Rabbi will attract people willing to pay a substantial part of their
not so substantial early in career income to bolster the census of young people
and the congregation’s future. Negatory
on that one. If we develop a mentoring
system for the young members they will be socialized into the shul’s way. The leaders never quite recognized that
sometimes the shul has to adapt to their way.
We don’t need to deal with the elephants in the room, whether the
literal elephant of morbid obesity that occupies my exam rooms or the
figurative element of learned women who are unwilling to occupy our sanctuary
and take care to teach their offspring why. Delusions abound.

My congregation has had consultants with valid recommendations
before. There was even an implementation
committee that did not implement or even understand that the heart and soul of
the recommendations involved a redirection of governance and committee
structure. They have had focus
groups. This begot BINGO which was
carefully planned and seems to be serving its intended purpose. Little else is as carefully planned and fulfills its purpose. There were brainstorming evenings that went
nowhere. There were focus groups
attended by people on the A-list recommending more of the same. We have a desire for membership but a series
of membership VP reports that read like an accounting exercise. They don’t even have an accurate census of
who the members are.

Where this consultation seems to differ from a medical or
legal consultation may be in who gets examined.
What strikes me as most bizarre about the proposal, sent to me by a Board member which I no longer am, was that the consultant
focuses on the Board which is increasingly incestuous and this time largely
hand-picked by the president rather than constructed objectively by the
Nominating Committee that functioned more as a telephone squad to convey
invitations. I never examine the
referring physician, only the product of the decisions made by that
physician. I never ask the physician to
change anything. I assume the authority
for those changes. This type of
examination should not involve the Board who really needs to take responsibility
for the disappointing outcome.
Historical information is better solicited from people who used to be
there but no longer are, whether the departure had been from the shul’s membership
roster, declining presence in the sanctuary or not renewing participation on a
committee. There is a certain amount of
objective information that a consultant would be expected to review, provided
by the officers and the board and rabbi but interpreted or placed into context
by the consultant. This could include
financial data and attendance data or the contents of the Shabbat bulletins
three years ago compared to last year or contents of the publications that our congregation disseminates to its membership and to the wider community.

Reading the proposal for spending $3G’s on this, it can be done a lot more economically by having the officers understand the great sage Reb Pogo who met the enemy and he is us.

About Me

My work takes me to hospital bedsides and exam rooms. I interview people, examine them, think about them, and come up with my best assessment of how to fix things. Those medical skills are transferable to Judaism as well.